International Auxiliary Language - History

History

Some of the philosophical languages of the 17th-18th centuries could be regarded as proto-auxlangs, as they were intended by their creators to serve as bridges among people of different languages as well as to disambiguate and clarify thought. However, most or all of these languages were, as far as we can tell from the surviving publications about them, too incomplete and unfinished to serve as auxlangs (or for any other practical purpose). The first fully developed constructed languages we know of, as well as the first constructed languages devised primarily as auxlangs, originated in the 19th century; Solresol by François Sudre, a language based on musical notes, was the first to gain widespread attention although not, apparently, fluent speakers. Volapük, first described in an article in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer and in book form the following year, was the first to garner a widespread international speaker community. Three major Volapük conventions were held, in 1884, 1887, and 1889; the last of them used Volapük as its working language. André Cherpillod writes of the third Volapük convention,

In August 1889 the third convention was held in Paris. About two hundred people from many countries attended. And, unlike in the first two conventions, people spoke only Volapük. For the first time in the history of mankind, sixteen years before the Boulogne convention, an international convention spoke an international language.

However, not long after this the Volapük speaker community broke up due to various factors, including controversies between Schleyer and other prominent Volapük speakers, and the appearance of newer, easier-to-learn planned languages, primarily Esperanto. This language was developed from about 1878-1887, and published in that year, by L. L. Zamenhof. Within a few years it had thousands of fluent speakers, primarily in eastern Europe. In 1905 its first world convention was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer. A wide variety of other auxlangs were devised and proposed in the 1880s-1900s, but none except Esperanto gathered a speaker community until Ido.

The "Délégation pour l'adoption d'une langue auxiliaire internationale" was founded in 1900 by Louis Couturat and others; it tried to get the International Association of Academies to take up the question of an international auxiliary language, study the existing ones and pick one or design a new one. However, the meta-academy declining to do so, the Delegation decided to do the job itself. Among Esperanto speakers there was a general impression that the Delegation would of course choose Esperanto, as it was the only auxlang with a sizable speaker community at the time; it was felt as a betrayal by many Esperanto speakers when in 1907 the Delegation came up with its own reformed version of Esperanto, Ido. Ido drew a significant number of speakers away from Esperanto in the short term, but in the longer term most of these either returned to Esperanto or moved on to other new auxlangs. Still, Ido remains today one of the three most widely spoken auxlangs.

Edgar von Wahl's Occidental (also called "Interlingue"; 1922) was in reaction against the perceived artificiality of some earlier auxlangs, particularly Esperanto; von Wahl created a language whose words, including compound words, would have a high degree of recognizability for those who already know a Romance language. However, this design criterion was in conflict with ease of coining new compound or derived words on the fly while speaking. Occidental gained a small speaker community in the 1920s and 1930s, and supported several publications, but had almost entirely died out by the 1980s. More recently Occidental has been revived on the Internet.

The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 by Alice Vanderbilt Morris; like the earlier Delegation, it at first worked on studying language problems and the existing auxlangs and proposals for auxlangs, and attempted to negotiate some consensus between the supporters of various auxlangs. However, like the Delegation, it finally decided to create its own auxlang; Interlingua, published in 1951, was primarily the work of Alexander Gode, though he built on preliminary work by earlier IALA linguists including André Martinet. Interlingua, like Occidental, was designed to have words recognizable at sight by those who already know a Romance language or a language like English with much vocabulary borrowed from Romance languages; to attain this end Gode accepted a degree of grammatical and orthographic irregularity and complexity considerably greater than in Volapük, Esperanto or Ido, though still less than in most natural languages. Interlingua gained a significant speaker community, perhaps roughly the same size as that of Ido (considerably less than the size of Esperanto.)

Esperanto suffered a setback after the 1922 proposal by Iran and several other small countries in the League of Nations to have Esperanto taught in member nations' schools failed, and Esperanto speakers were subject to persecution under Hitler and Stalin's regimes, but in spite of these factors more people continued to learn Esperanto, and significant literary work (both poetry and novels) began to appear in Esperanto in the period between the World Wars.

All of the auxlangs with a surviving speaker community seem to have benefited from the advent of the Internet, Esperanto more than most. The CONLANG mailing list was founded in 1991; in its early years discussion focused on international auxiliary languages. As people interested in artistic languages and engineered languages grew to be the majority of the list members, and flame-wars between proponents of particular auxlangs irritated these members, a separate AUXLANG mailing list was created, which has been the primary venue for discussion of auxlangs since then. Besides giving the existing auxlangs with speaker communities a chance to interact rapidly online as well as slowly through postal mail or more rarely in personal meetings, the Internet has also made it easier to publicize new auxlang projects, and a handful of these have gained a small speaker community, including Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova, Mondlango and Toki Pona.